


Our Princess

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Awesome Leia Organa, BAMF Leia Organa, Brother-Sister Relationships, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Luke, In Memory of Carrie Fisher, Leia Dies, Mother-Son Relationship, POV Poe Dameron, Poe Dameron Needs A Hug, Real Life, Team as Family, Tributes, Twins, We'll miss you, memorium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 21:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9091624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: X-Wing pilots have an average life expectancy of three weeks.It was supposed to be Poe that went like this. Not her. Never her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> In loving memory of Carrie Fisher, our Princess Leia. Thank you for your light, your humour, your compassion, your love. You helped make us all the people we are today. May the force be with you.  
> AN: Characters and image don't belong to me.

Poe finds Luke in the far corner of the hangar the morning after it happens. He isn’t crying.

He hadn’t been with Luke when it happened. Had been flying a mission, locked in a dog fight, seconds from being blown out of the sky. He still felt it though. Felt something give, in some indefinable corner of his mind, something snap in the air around him, something scream in the galaxy at large.

Luke was in the training room with Rey, less than a hundred yards from the Command Center. People around him later say they could actually hear the snap, like a thousand bones breaking at once.

Rey will later look at Poe with tears wet on her cheeks, and wonder aloud how Luke didn’t scream.

Poe will later wonder how they didn’t lose them both, right then and there, lose one twin in the same instant they lost the other. Because Poe is as force sensitive as a rock, and he felt the fourth most powerful force presence in the galaxy snuff out from a hundred parsecs away.

Poe will later wonder how any of them survived the death of Leia Organa at all.

\--

Poe has a picture jammed into the inside of his helmet. He put it there on his first day of flight school, and has somehow never found occasion to put it anywhere else. He takes it out before every flight he ever makes, doesn’t touch, barely even looks at it sometimes, but he takes it out for a moment before putting it back, careful of creases. It’s always seen him home again.

The average life expectancy of an X-wing pilot is three weeks. Apparently that is one week higher than it was in the Rebellion, but either way, it makes Poe impossibly old.

He’s prepared to go out that way, his effects and wishes long ago filed safely with the General.

She sees him off on that mission that will take him a hundred parsecs away when it happens. She looked good. A little tired perhaps, but on the whole no different than she had looked for the past dozen years or more.

Poe is a hundred parsecs away when she dies. He never quite forgives himself for that.

00

It was a heart tremor Dr. Kalonia tells him gently, when he finally makes it back to the base three days and a lifetime too late. Only Finn is there to greet him, wrapping him in a hug that seems to not quite know how to react. Poe knows the feeling. He would have thought he knew how to lose mothers by now, but apparently not.

\--

It’s been two weeks, long enough for the remaining leadership to start making noise about the rest of the remaining leadership. Poe quietly filed Luke’s signed promotion that he found in the General’s desk the day after the day after that. No one has noticed it yet.

Poe wishes she was here to see those fireworks, when they come.

It’s been two weeks, and this is the day they burned her. Poe had wanted to object to that. Leia Organa wasn’t a Jedi, had never wanted to be. She had given enough to the Force.

But so had her brother, so Poe had stood quietly beside Rey and Finn and Lando and Chewie, watching Luke watch flames consume the last of his family that didn’t wear a mask and despise everything about everything, rows upon rows of troops arrayed around them like a parody of a victory party.

It’s been two weeks and Poe has yet to shed a tear.

He can still smell smoke in the air when Lando suggests checking on Luke, and Poe is up and out the door before he pauses to think that maybe Lando hadn’t meant him.

He’s almost at the hangar deck before he shrugs and remembers that there aren’t many other people left to send.

He’s beside Luke Skywalker before he pauses to wonder how he knew where to look at all.

\--

“The General used to tell me stories about you, you know. Really, really cool ones. Like, insanely cool ones.”

Poe grew up climbing his mother’s X-wing, so even without the Force scrambling up beside Luke’s motionless form on Black One’s wing is a work of mere moments. But that is still long enough that Luke should have responded in some way, however minute. Because Poe is many things, but quiet is not one of them. 

Taking his time to settle casually against the wing juncture, feet dangling where Luke’s must be curled under all those robes, Poe considers what to say next.

He’s still considering when Luke breaks the silence for him, voice rough enough to indicate that Poe’s lack of tears isn’t a universal thing. He’s glad for that.

“Did she ever tell you the one where we rescued her from the Empire?” It sounds like an old, familiar tease, the utterer momentarily forgetting that the standard recipient isn’t here anymore.  
Poe doesn’t let that lull stand. “She said you were rather short for a Stormtrooper.” There’s a minute pause, a minute hitch of prematurely old looking shoulders before something ragged and raw that might be a laugh as much as it might be a sob is dragged past the Jedi’s lips. The sandy-grey head bobs up and down slightly, the gaze still steadfastly fixed in opposite direction.

A lull forms anyway. Below Black One’s support struts, BB warbles sadly. Leia gave the little guy to Poe the first Life Day after his mother died.

Poe’s throat tightens around his next salvo attempt. “General Organa loved Life Day. She always used to sing to the entire base, even though she also always said the song was really rather ludicrous.” Poe was raised to speak slightly upper-crust by a decidedly lower-crust father, but just forming the syllables of that sentence somehow feels like a disrespectful parody.

Luke’s prosthetic hand clinks against the cockpit window, startling Poe momentarily. Silence descends again.

Poe feels decidedly silly for what he does next, not really sure what possesses him, not really sure why he is here because no one in the galaxy can properly understand what this man, perched atop Poe’s X-Wing like a disheveled, cloak wearing lost duckling in a galaxy full of hunters with really big guns, has lost, and Poe might be good at losing mothers by now but she wasn’t his mother, not properly. She wasn't anything he has a right to claim.

Poe’s hand is closing around his helmet, his feet scrabbling to find purchse on the polished hull as he belly crawls across his cockpit to find what he’s looking for when he remembers why Ben was named Ben, remembers a man Luke has spent a lifetime mourning after knowing for all of a day, a man who wasn’t Luke’s father, not in anyway that counted to the galaxy.

His fingers catch his visor, cinching together, pulling up.

Luke hasn’t moved an inch, his head perhaps a fraction of a millimeter closer to Poe, that’s it. Poe settles on his stomach next to Luke, helmet carefully balanced next to the Jedi Master’s knee, and dips one hand into the helmet as he’s done a thousand times before.

00

Poe keeps a picture in his helmet. He must have looked at it a thousand times growing up, and several thousand more since. Poe had his sexual awakening looking at the blue eyes in that picture, used it discreetly for nearly a decade to try and find the man currently sitting less than a foot in front of him. It’s his favourite picture, his most treasured possession.

Poe knows when it was taken, who it’s of. But most of all, he knows what it means.

He holds it up to the light with rock steady hands, waits for the gasp, for the ragged sob that follows, for the steel cold fingers that prize it gently from his grasp. It’s a long time before either of them speak again, but Poe has never been the most tactful with meaningful silences, so no points for who breaks first.

“My mother gave me that when I was born, tucked it into my swaddling blanket, according to my father. I think she wanted me to know what you were all fighting for.”

Another ragged sob joins the first, the picture still reverently unbent.

Poe knows he should probably shut up now, but somehow it slips out. The thought he's been replaying since he was six years old, and first met Luke Skywalker in the flesh. “You all look really happy.”

A pause. With nigh the barest rustle of robes, a bearded chin finally swings in Poe’s direction, blue eyes slanting up and sideways in an echo of that holostill, taken all those years ago in a different base, by a different X-Wing, in a different rebellion.

Tears are steadily coursing down wind-roughened features, but for the briefest of moments, Poe swears he sees the warmest smile he’s ever witnessed, wet with salt, but fresh with joy.

“We were Poe. We really were.”

Poe grew up calling Leia Auntie Princess. X-wing pilots have an average life expectancy of three weeks in the Resistance, and Poe never expected to have to bury another mother.

Neither of them should be here, on this X-Wing, tears and old photos all that’s left outside of their memories. But they are here, and Poe is many things but a quitter is not one of them.

He carefully edges closer, sliding on his stomach until he nearly tips off the wing, settling his chin again Luke’s curled knee.

It takes a moment, but slowly, a careful metal fingered hand finds its way through Poe’s tousled hair, over and over.

The picture catches the light, leaning against Luke’s boot. Poe looks at the smiling figures until his eyes begin to blur.

He never has quite known when to stop. “Happy Life Day Uncle Luke.” It’s choked with tears, and Poe lets them fall with something not unlike relief.

The hand keeps moving, the sobs keep hitching above his head. But the whisper is still audible enough to hear. “Thanks buddy.”

Poe hopes it to be true.

00

When Poe is seven years old, his mom dies. His Auntie Leia comes to the funeral. Afterwards she kneels down in front of him, looks him straight in the eyes, smiles through her tears, and says;

“It’s going to be okay Poe. I promise.”

He believes her. Because it’s his Auntie Leia, and she is a princess.

And because she loves him, and he loves her, and that’s all that really matters in the end. His mom always said so.

And mom never lied.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Image link: https://throughtwoblueeyes.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/tumblr_l8nfo6gyhr1qc5859o1_500.jpg


End file.
